The ‘Rat Unit’ and the Maze

The animal, the animot, is the generic living being that lacks something – typically, language. To avoid misunderstandings and accusations, especially from some animalists, let me clarify this: the fact that nonhuman animals do not have a (human) language does not entail that other forms of communication are uncommon among them. The point is not that a mouse, for example, cannot speak English – for then we should ask ourselves why a human being cannot use a bat’s echolocation system. No, the problem is not what the animal – any animal – lacks, but rather what its ‘degree of power’ is (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 256). It is necessary to leave behind the comparative logic that always favours the human animal, and consider every individual body in itself, and not in relation to another. The identity machine establishes that something is an x by virtue of being a non-y; however, this means subordinating affirmation to negation. On the contrary, animality means that an affirmation does not oppose anything, nor does it differentiate itself from anything: it is pure affirmation, because ‘difference is affirmation’ (Deleuze 2001a: 55). The objective is that of seeing animality in itself, and not in relation to humanity. That a trout has no language is no more meaningful than the fact that a human mammal has no feathers.

Let us return, then, to the voiceless animal. According to the anthropocentric standpoint, this amounts to a lack. So, if the animal cannot talk, we are still unsatisfied: for even the quiet animal will not be left alone by us. That silence perturbs the loquacious living being: does it mean that animals have nothing to say to us, or are ignoring us? And so, we try to teach them to speak our language – as has been repeatedly attempted from the 1960s onwards (Wallman 1992; Lyn 2012). The goal of these experiments has never been clear: to demonstrate that animals can talk like humans, or that they cannot? Either way, clearly the object of interest was never their language (Despret 2002).